If you’ve spent more than five minutes playing Town Star (and there’s a good chance you have if you’re reading this article), you’ve probably noticed that things aren’t always equal. Some fields require water, and others do not. Some crafts produce quickly while others drag. Sometimes you’ll see awesome green needles, indicating maximum efficiency, and other times you’ll see scary red needles that make you want to smash your keyboard through your screen.

It’s time to get the scoop on proximity effects. Figure them out, and not only will Town Star become even more enjoyable, but you’ll be better equipped to win and earn.

Sometimes called passive effects or area effects, proximity effects are one of the most important things to understand in order to become an effective Town Star player. This game is about synergy, organization and efficiency. It’s about building a complex machine that grows, produces, and crafts the things that will make you money in the most efficient ways possible.

Proximity effects are the ways in which certain buildings and geographies affect the area around them. Some of them are are positive effects, while others are negative and detrimental to your town’s efficiency. If you can master the placement of your buildings and fields in a way that maximizes the positive proximity effects while minimizing the negative ones, you’re well on your way to the realm of the Town Star elite.

Proximity Effect Shorthand

Before we start describing and explaining the various proximity effects, it’s important that we understand how they are expressed. There is a simple method of explaining how proximity effects work. It always works the same in Town Star, no matter the proximity effect. We call it the stairstep method.

If a particular building has a proximity effect of 4, here is a diagram of what that means.

A proximity effect of 4 means essentially that the first tiles adjacent to the building receive 4 of the effect. The next ring of tiles out receives 3, then 2, then finally, 1. Pictured in the diagram is the entire proximity radius of that building’s effect (whether positive or negative). Notice that diagonals are treated a little differently. The first ring of proximity effect includes all diagonals as 1 tile, but diagonally adjacent tiles are gradually removed from the effect radius.

Proximity Radius = 4 (in this example)

Now you know what we mean when we say that a certain building “provides 3 oil,” or that another one “casts 3 tiles of shade.”

Negative Proximity Effects

Let’s start with the bad news. These are the things you want to avoid the effects of whenever you can: The negative proximity effects.

A negative proximity effect is never universal. That means that no matter how much dirty pollution or shade are created by a building, its negative effects will only be experienced by certain specific units.

You may be confused now, wondering how you can possibly know which negative proximity effects negatively affect which buildings. This is more simple than you may think, and you can usually use common sense to solve that puzzle.

This poor little Wheat Field is clearly out of place around the Refineries and Power Plants. Because of pollution and shade, we’re seeing a red needle and long production time.

Buildings that require wind (Windmills, Wind Turbines and Wind Pumps) are negatively affected by wind block.

Buildings that require sunlight (Fields) are negatively affected by shade.

Shade and wind block are caused either by mountains, or buildings with height. The taller the building, the greater the shade and wind block it casts.

Pollution is created by industrial production buildings, and negatively affects fields in the same way as shade and wind block.

Compounding Negative Effects

Negative proximity effects work in the way pictured in the above diagram, but their symptoms are different than those of positive effects. Negative proximity effects lower the efficiency needle on fields and production buildings based on the effect radii of the buildings causing them.

For example, Windmills have a shade radius of 3 tiles. Is a Windmill is placed more than 3 tiles away from the nearest Windmill, production will be perfectly efficient and both Windmills’ needles will be in the green.

This is ideal placement, but I can’t keep it up forever.

However, if those Windmills are moved 1 tile closer together, then they begin to affect one another negatively with shade. Now, each of those Windmills will have 1 negative point against its perfect production, causing its timer to double from 30 seconds to 60 seconds.

This is not perfect, but still pretty good.

Finally, if you move each of those Windmills one step closer still, they will inflict upon each other the maximum negative proximity effect of -3 points. The result is two more doublings to the production timer, or a total of 240 seconds for each round of production.

I should avoid this type of placement for as long as I have room.

Positive Proximity Effects

Positive proximity effects are a lot more fun than negative ones. Many of the NFTs sold in the Town Star store offer positive proximity effects as a benefit. Sometimes we call these passive production benefits.

The simplest passive production benefit to explain is water. Fields are provided passive water when they are placed near natural water, such as a pond or a marsh. Each pond provides 2 water, which means that it provides 2 units of water to directly adjacent tiles and 1 to the next ring of tiles.

Wheat Fields require 3 units of water to grow wheat. In the example below, you’ll notice that the selected Wheat Field is 2 spaces away from one pond (1 passive water) and 1 space away from another pond (2 passive water).

I should definitely build a pond in the middle of that cluster of Wheat Fields.

Positive proximity effects are only applied to production buildings, such as Fields, Windmills, Chicken Coops, etc. A Water Facility (which makes industrial water drums) is another example of a production building, so it can also be supplied passive water when placed near ponds.

Other passive benefit units include Wheat Stands (which provide passive wheat for production in a Windmill or Feed Trough), Solar Panels (which provide passive energy to surrounding industrial production centers), and Water Pumps (which provide passive water drums) to industrial production buildings that require water.

There are even some NFTs that provide unexpected passive resources, such as the Haunted Mansion, which (depending on the piece) provides passive oil and perhaps pumpkins.

Passive pumpkins are produced by the Haunted Porch and delivered to the Silo by the Headless Horticulturist.

More Subtle Proximity Effects

There are a few proximity effects that have subtle effects which may be difficult to spot at a glance. We’ll give you a hint, but let you discover the details on your own. Pay attention to salty land that is next to oceans, and pay attention to the especially sandy land that is found in deserts.

Don’t forget that mountains cause a lot of shade. If you’re next to a mountain, you may be able to mine precious minerals from underground, but you’ll need to account for the 5 tiles of shade that the mountain always causes on an entire side of your town.

When you’re next to a river of fresh water, take full advantage of that water. It works exactly like a row of ponds, saving you a great deal of trouble watering your fields if you’re clever.

Some buildings even give both positive and negative proximity effects. Consider the Power Plant. It may provide a great deal of passive energy to surrounding buildings, but it also has a pretty wide pollution radius.

As you become the master of your Town Star domain, you’ll start to see everything in terms of proximity effects. The way things work together in a great web of causality is not only how the game works, but how the world works.

Hopefully this article has given you some good insight into the world of Town Star proximity effects and helped you to find greater strategy and depth in your game!

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Part 6 — The Crucible

On her way to the Crucible, Valentina realized she hadn’t slept in days. She always had the strangest dreams when she visited this place anyway. The Ancients called it the Gallows of Time. Valentina never knew exactly what that meant, but to her it was the place where time goes to die. The FTL engines of the Asterius had worked hard over the last week. Valentina knew that her ship needed some serious attention, and she hoped that Mateo would have a hanger to spare at his home in the remote outlying star system whose name she couldn’t remember. Luckily, she still had its coordinates though after all these years.

Mateo’s place was ramshackle, or at least that’s how it was supposed to look to approaching ships. It was one of many bolt-holes maintained by the wider smuggling community in case one of their own needed to cool their heels. It was bigger (and more armed) than it looked.

Valentina knew Mateo well. They met when she first branched out into smuggling, just after she got ahold of the Asterias. He was a better than average forger, usually had reliable pass-codes, and kept a couple decent mechanics on staff. He had a lot of friends who knew a lot of things. If she was lucky, he may know something about her run gone sour.

Mateo was about as close as any decent smuggler came to a trusted friend. Valentina would go so far as to say she trusted him. “Trust is a dirty word. The dirtiest,” her mentor used to say. She was reasonably sure she wouldn’t be betrayed, but that didn’t stop her from keeping a close eye on her surroundings as the Asterius came in for landing.

Valentina set the Asterias down on one of Mateo’s many empty landing pads. Mateo didn’t entertain very often, and he didn’t like most people enough to let them use his personal landing pad. Still, she took the liberty of front parking, rather than the larger pad out back, the one reserved for clients.

“Still got that bottle of brandy I gave you?’ Valentina called in a teasing as she wandered into the house, knowing full well that he drank it long ago. Under the cover of its rough outsides, Mateo kept a tidy space. She wasn’t just being cute, she was announcing her identity in hopes that she could avoid getting blasted by a security bot. Mateo took his security very seriously. “Picked up heat and I don’t feel like fighting today.”

“Valentina Barbaro, running away from a fight? My goodness, is the End of Times on us already?”

Mateo’s rough, gravelly voice drifted out of his living space, so Valentina pushed the beaded curtain out of the way and stepped into the large kitchen where the man was waiting. He was a short, stocky old man with a wild beard and a nervous twitch to his hands.

“Little more heat than I like to tangle with,” Valentina chuckled as she stooped to kiss his whiskered cheek. She felt a strange tenseness in Mateo when she moved in close. “Something the matter?”

“This and that,” Mateo told her with a wave of his hand he was attempting to play off as casual. “Let me see what I have in the cooler. I know you like fresh fruit.”

He was dodging the question, and that wasn’t like him. Mateo liked the sound of his own voice too much to ever keep quiet. Once his back was turned, Valentina’s eyes took a quick attentive stroll over the table where he had been sitting. A lone data chip sat not far from Mateo’s data pad.

Without quite knowing why, Valentina snatched the chip. She knew it wasn’t the best idea, but curiosity got the better of her. She justified it as payback for their last encounter, when Mateo’s foolishness had cost her a handsome payout. No room for mistakes like that. She jammed the chip into her own data pad and downloaded the content quickly, then set it back exactly where it was just a moment before.

Glancing at her pad , she could make out coordinates of some kind, maybe something valuable even? Valentina promised herself a better look once she was back on the Asterias.

“So, tell me about the fight you don’t want to fight,” Mateo said when he came back from the kitchen, a plate of cut fruit in hand. “Anything that’s too much for Valentina Barbaro is my kind of story.”

“Thought it was a normal run,” Valentina told him, just a little bitter as she took a piece of fruit. “Last stop took me through Shepherd’s Void, and you know how they get about smugglers. I was hoping you maybe heard something?” The fruit was bitter too.

“Plenty of chatter in subspace but nothing about you, Valentina. I think you have the right of it, Garrison hates smugglers, nothing more, nothing less.”

“Well it’s good I got paid in advance then. I’ll be steering clear of House Space for a long while.”

And with that, Valentina has left the Ember’s Grace star cluster, meaning that claims there are no longer available until she returns. Perhaps the next chapter of her story will reveal her next destination.

Stay tuned for more of Valentina’s adventure, and the next cluster of the Celestial Claim Land Presale, from Echoes of Empire!

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